"There's a lot of data we could collect, that makes me nervous, so I try to think about how to do telemetry in a more privacy-preserving way."
Yeah that's called turning off telemetry. I get money now please for be smart designer woman?
"So I looked for attention signals, and then plotted this web history, taking 50 nodes and converting them into 7, it's a very opinionated view..." Yes, and they're the opinions of an old white guy who has been doing UX for proprietary browsers for 30 years, and it shows. I'm racking my brain to see if I have any friends who would want this. This is peak solutions seeking problems on the missed connections section of Craigslist.
Oh, this isn't for users. Apparently. It was apparently research for the history/storytelling about data that people also will not use and will find invasive. Good shit, good shit. Love it up. Keep it up in Q4, we have to keep momentum up for acquisition.
In the Q&A, a member of the audience asks about the security implications of storing this much data, and compares it directly to Windows Recall. The presenter, Scott, says a few right-sounding things, already having some language for this problem: that you make the world's greatest honeypot, that this is why he focused on collecting attention metrics instead of content, and that Microsoft implemented the feature very stupidly (and that WE can do it better). That last part in particular plays well to the ego of the audience.
But Windows Recall wasn't just badly implemented. It was badly conceived. It was data collection that nobody wanted, all risk, no reward. Not seeing that, makes it seem even more likely than it already did that Scott would fall into the same concept-level failures. His point about people storing their bank credentials on computers doesn't invalidate this point, it makes it more harrowing. Linux desktop security is not okay (which is why misguided people reach to containers for salvation).
I do not care about memory, or storytelling, or having a pile of notes attached to every document, or some secretly-collected web of my activity, in my desktop. It's a productivity machine. Most of those are pointless and some are upsetting. I just want to use my tools without them trying to use or outsmart me.
Maybe it's not enough to say this is solutions in search of problems, because it's that but more so and in a specific way. The desktop has largely stopped evolving because it got good enough at a very wide variety of productivity and fun tasks, and then we ran out of legitimate room to sell new features. As someone who now sees the value of finished software, that's fucking fantastic, exactly what you want to see. It is literally only a problem, instead of a miracle, if you need to sell new features every quarter. It's contrived. And the only reason to contrive it is persuading people to spend money on the new version of a proprietary OS.
Hard pass, pal-o-mine.